THE FATEFUL LIGHT
When Martinique was a young colony, when Versailles was the palace of
a king, away in those sunlit times before the storm of the Revolution,
the Jardin des Plantes of St. Pierre was a garden. The most curious
and the most beautiful in the world. The spacious imagination that
conceived Versailles touched the tropical forest, and the hand that
laid out Luciennes fell upon the ceibas, the palmistes and the
_loseille bois_. The poetry and perfect beauty of the tropical trees,
the splendour of the creeping plants, fathoms of convolvulus, air
gardens where orchids swung suspended by the cables of the Liantasse,
tree ferns, trumpet flowers, star flowers, all lay there waiting for
the gardener, just as in life all the splendour of passion, the beauty
of love, and the mystery of death lie waiting for the poet.
He came and the cutlasses sounded amidst the air shoots and the lianas,
he destroyed nothing needlessly, pushing the forest back where a path
should go, making here a fairy lake—less a lake than a mirror for the
tree ferns to see themselves in—here a glade, a twilit home for a
statue. He heard the murmur of the waterfall, whose voice still sounds
like a voice of mourning for the ruin of his work, and he brought the
waterfall into the scheme of things. You can fancy how beautiful it
was, this garden in the old day, scented, languorous, sunlit, twilit,
filled with the notes of the bell bird and the _siffleur de montagne_,
the whisper of the trees and the voice of the waterfall.
As certainly as there were flowers in that garden there were lovers;
men fought and killed one another in the _allée des duels_; what a
volume of romance lay here brightly written, vivid in colour, of which
remains nothing but a few torn leaves; faded pictures where the forest
had half blotted out the garden paths and the glades from which the
statues have vanished.
The _fer de lance_ hides amidst the leaves and makes the place
frightful with death. He is the crowning fascination of the ruined
garden.
Gaspard, releasing the lips of the girl, and holding her warm body
close to him, kissed her eyes, her forehead, her hair. Beyond the
gates, the roadway like a great white lamp burned in the sun trying
to pierce the gloom. The world seemed trying to peep at them, and the
forest with its great green sleeve to shelter them from the world.
“Come here—here!—here! forget the world and the road—follow me where
the ferns are high—into the twilight—come here!—here!”
A _siffleur de montagne_ in the gloom of the garden was calling to his
mate; they scarcely heard him yet they came, taking a path on the left,
a path hemmed on either side by tree ferns and hundred feet soaring
palms.
“You love me!”
“_Ché_—I have loved you since the world began.”
The reply held all the truth of love.
She had loved him since the world began. Aeons before Martinique saw
the white men from the East, in the dawn of time, dim, cometic, her
being had been projected towards his, that she might stand in the
Jardin des Plantes clasped in the arms of Gaspard a million ancestors
had lived and loved, and died; that he might stand clasping her in his
arms a million ancestors had fought the battle of life. This embrace
was the victory of the dead over death, the triumph of life over time.
In eight words she had spoken the secret which all lovers feel vaguely
in the depths of their being. “I have loved you since the world began.”
The voice of the waterfall came now through the trees, a burst of light
shewed where the palms and angelines, the ferns, and the ceibas, gave
place to the lake into which the torrent falls leaping, rainbowed,
dim with mist from amidst the foliage of the cliff; a hundred feet of
cascading water, every drop a gem. It seemed alive and laughing, if
water spirit ever lived she surely lived here. Then, as they stood
watching it, just as though the spirit had lost its gaiety, the rainbow
dazzle passed away and dimness spread through the glade. The sun was
sinking above the treetops.
Marie glanced up.
“Come,” she said, “the light is fading—ah, the sun, could he not have
waited a little longer! but he waits for no one, not even for us.”
It was dark when they reached St. Pierre. The night had welled up
from the harbour like a flood, the moon was up, and the stars alight
in the dark pansy-blue above, but Pelée’s crest still held a touch of
sunlight. One might have imagined the day standing there just before
flight on that burning crest. Then, spreading wings westward as the
light left the summit, leaving Martinique to night and the stars.
All the way along the road from the Jardin des Plantes the great
fireflies had waltzed and drifted about them, they had heard the first
shuddering of the night wind in the palms, they had paused to listen,
the night had told them things beyond the comprehension of all but
lovers and poets. The Creole French of the tropics still hold a veil
between their minds, yet they understood one another perfectly.
They came by the sea way, the harbour was full of stars and the
anchor lights of the ships in the bay, shone like glow-worms, the red
port-light of a steamer sent a red ripple of light across the water.
They could hear the wash of the little waves against the sea-steps, and
from out there somewhere in the starlight the “creak-creak” of oars.
Some shore boat was putting off from a ship.
“See,” said Gaspard, “out there, that light near the steamer, that
is _La Belle Arlésienne_.” He had told her on their way back of how
Sagesse had pushed forward the expedition intending to start on Friday.
The news had been a blow to her—how hard a blow he did not guess, for
in the darkness he did not see the tears in her eyes, or the quivering
of her lips.
She looked across the water at the fateful light. It seemed to her
sinister, the eye of a _Zombi_ staring straight at her, malignant, and
threatening.
“I am taking him away,” said the light, “beyond the rim of the sea; you
have seen the ships go there, great ships that become little ships,
and then just specks that vanish utterly, just as people vanish when
they die. Remember Ti Finotte; she passed away like that, and the sun
remains and the blue sea, and sky, but she has not returned—she will
never come back. Yes, I am taking him away. I am the _Zombi_ who comes
to take away happiness. I change my form as _Zombis_ do; you saw me
once before, I was then the coffin in which they placed Ti Finotte away
there, amidst the blowing palms of Morne Rouge, now I am the light that
will take away your love across the wind-blown sea.”
She turned to Gaspard, and casting her arms about his neck, pressing
her face to his breast—sobbed. She could keep a brave heart when he
told her of his going, she could keep the words back that would tell
him of her despair, but she could no longer control her tears. Fate
had spoken to her. That mind which knew nothing, knew everything. In
days long past, by the blue Caribbean Sea, the women of her remote
ancestry had seen their men going away, never, perhaps, to return, and
had clasped them like this. Grief, who is ageless, had cast them upon
the breasts of their lovers. Just as in her love she had resumed their
love, so in her grief she was resuming their sorrow.
There by the starlit harbour of St. Pierre, this girl of the people,
clasping this man of the people, formed with him a picture that the
patient stars had watched for ages. The story of love and separation
told by two forms clinging together—a vision statuesque, eternal.
“But I will come back—and it is not yet—not for some days—”
“You will come back?”
“Ah, believe me, nothing will stop me—nothing—nothing.”
“It is so far—I do not know where. If I knew; but the ships go away
out there, and it is the distance that takes my heart from me; they
fade into nothing, pass into the sky.”
“But they come back—you have seen the ships come back?”
His voice told her that he was in trouble, and that it was her grief
that caused his trouble. She could not tell whether the ships she had
seen going away ever came back, the sailing vessels were all alike to
her. The American steamer came back, but it was different from the
others, but the trouble in his voice made her dry her eyes and answer
him.
“Yes—I had not thought of that, do not mind me, I am foolish—_ché_,
thou wilt surely return. The _Bon Dié_ will surely send you back to me.”
The boat that had been rowing across the harbour was now at the steps
near by, and a man was coming up the steps. It was Sagesse. He did
not notice them as he walked away towards the town, but they saw him
clearly.
Marie shuddered.
“Come,” said she, “how late it is—later than I have ever been before,
and the house will be closed.”
They turned, and by the Passage Bertine sought the Street of the
Precipice; there was not a soul to be seen, and the moonlight was now
pouring in the city.
The old street looked never more mysterious or beautiful than by this
light, brilliant, yet tinged with the suggestion of death, and snow,
and dreams. Had you seen Marie standing at the door of the house where
she lived, and knocking for admittance, dressed as she was in her robe,
light, and graceful as the dress of some Athenian woman, you might have
fancied yourself far from the world of our time, in some street of
Mycenae—some moonlit street of Taormina whence the flute-players had
just vanished, leaving behind them silence and the vision of Amaryllis
at her door.